The Rails Way

As I mentioned in the post on managing file uploads, the most common cause of an unresponsive rails application is having some long-running requests consuming all your rails processes. For managing uploads and downloads you can off-load the time-consuming work to apache modules like mod-x-sendfile and modporter, but for areas where your application’s logic itself is a bottleneck you need to use message queues . There are literally hundreds of different options available when choosing a message queue, so many that people often balk at the prospect of figuring out which product to use. There are several great presentations and articles comparing the pros and cons of all the different options out there, so I’m not going to try to do that here. Most of the reviews of work-queue solutions focus on using hundreds of workers to handle millions of messages a day. We all love a goo...